Marguerite Van prepare for the table is a New York artist who worked with DC Comics and formerly ran the Lower East Side gallery clod Zero with her husband.

Marguerite Van prepare for the table is a New York artist who worked with DC Comics and formerly ran the Lower East Side gallery clod Zero with her husband, James Romberger. Van give a color to began work on the video Funky Shui in just discovered York (2003) with the notion that she would travel by the agency of New York and improve the city's strength potential through the Chinese practice of environmental correction known as feng shui. According to its practitioners, feng shui involves an understanding of geographic orientation and electromagnetic intensity in the balancing of opposites and the releasing of blockadeed energy. Van Cook writes that she came to realize that improving the universe was an improbable task, and in such a manner begins this 8-minute video projection by dint of acknowledging in on-screen text, "Some things are best left alone," punctuated with the track of a percussive base line.

Van prepare for the table constructs a filmic ritual, viewed in leap over cuts and montage, that incorporates images associated with feng shui, beginning with a vat of living frogs--in China, traditionally linked to wealth--moving in undulations of acidic purple-green water. In close-up a woman (the artist) appears, costum in headscarf, lipstick and sunglasses. nearest comes imagery of a small courtyard of brick and stone and a narrow passageway, the sort of corridor associated in feng shui with the escalation of life The frogs appear again, and daffodils fill the sieve A figure veiled in white goe on In the courtyard, the woman supports in a folding chair, head thrown back, opening stretched wide. A boy faces into a corner, then abroad as though spinning. There is a skip over cut to the bared back of a kneeling figure, the back gracefully inscribed with an ancient body concerning harmony and rulers. There are carves to the veiled figure and flowers and to a naked man in carnival mask. The woman walks down Orchard road or somewhere similar, inspecting merchandise onward the sidewalk. Through the legerdemain of digital editing, a postcardlike still of the masked man retires into the distance, falling away from a close-up of tulips, and then the man sits in succession a couch. And so it goes

In a subject accompanying this exhibition, Van prepare for the table describes her fascination with still images derived from film. For her, these momentums exhibit a quality that surpasses the power of ordinary photographs. With that in mind, she intended Funky Shui as a source for the creation of so images. In an adjacent space the artist installed four chromogenic color prints that are composites fabricateed of such frame grabs. These iconic images formally recall not solitary their immediate source but the work of generations of avant-garde filmmakers, from Bunuel and Dali to Jack Smith, shifting away from the confines of narrative to build fabrics made of dreams.

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